PeopleAreGeek is my independent site. Free online tools, long-form technical articles, written for the people I sit next to every day: developers, sysadmins, security engineers, that whole crowd. I started it in early 2026 with one rule and I’ve been stubborn about it since. Every page earns its place. A tool that does its job in under 30 seconds, or an article you can actually act on without wading through a vendor pitch first. Three months in, 107 pages, and the rule still holds.
Why this site exists
Honestly, I got tired of hunting for a straight answer and finding noise. Two flavors of it. There’s the tutorial spam, shallow posts tuned for traffic that dangle the conclusion at the bottom so you scroll past three ads to reach it. Then the vendor marketing. Usually correct, quietly bent toward selling you something. I wanted a third option so I built one. Direct, opinionated, barely any ads, and in nobody’s pocket. Commands you can copy-paste. Results you check in the same tab you’re reading in.
The tools follow the same idea. They run in your browser, hand back an answer in seconds, and never ask you to sign up. When a topic needs more room than a tool can give, I link you to the article that explains it. A handful do need a server: DNS lookups and header checks, plus the TLS handshake. Those run through one custom WordPress plugin I wrote for the Site. Nothing fancy. Want to know exactly what touches a server and what doesn’t? I spell out the data flow in the Privacy Policy.
Focus areas
What we publish
Two formats, really. Tools are the interactive bits: paste something in, get your result. The shortest distance between you and the answer to one specific question. That’s the goal anyway. Articles are where I dig in. How to do a thing, and when one approach beats another. Where the trade-offs actually bite. What you won’t find is filler reheating the official docs, or a “what is X” piece that exists purely to rank for the term. If I’ve written about something, it’s because I have an opinion on how to do it well in 2026. And I’m willing to make the case.
Who is behind it
It’s just me. I’m Stéphane. Based in Cenon, just outside Bordeaux in France, and by day I do cybersecurity engineering and systems administration. So when you read something here, it’s coming from someone who’s actually hardened production WordPress sites and sat there at midnight debugging a Linux box that flatly refused to behave. Someone who’s weighed up LLM stacks for real work, then had to explain the whole mess to people who don’t speak the jargon. Now and then I bring in someone who knows a corner better than I do. When that happens I credit them right in the article.
How the Site is funded
This is a side project. I pay for it out of my own pocket. Right now the only thing bringing any money in is the optional €49 manual security audit through the Cyber Audit Suite. The free tools and articles stay free. Never gated. Maybe I add display ads down the line to cover hosting and the hours I sink into upkeep, I honestly haven’t decided. But if I do, you’ll hear it on the homepage first. I’ll write it into the Privacy Policy, and a proper EU consent flow goes live before a single ad ever loads.
Editorial principles
- No paid placement. If I point you at a vendor tool, it’s because it fits the job. Nobody pays to get mentioned here. Ever.
- Updates are dated. Every article carries a “Last updated” date and I revisit each one at least twice a year. Something big drops, a new Node.js LTS or the next flagship LLM, and I fold the change in with a short note so you know what moved.
- Corrections are visible. When I get something wrong and a reader calls it out, I fix it and leave a correction note at the bottom. I’m not going to quietly rewrite history and pretend I nailed it first try.
- No clickbait titles. If a guide says “10 reasons your site is slow,” it should hand you those reasons up top, not make you hunt for them. Descriptive title, conclusion early. The details can come after.
Have a topic you would like covered?
Suggestions and corrections, or the occasional “you got this wrong.” Send them my way. Drop a line to contact@peoplearegeek.com and it lands in the inbox I read every day.
Site stats
As I write this, here’s where the Site stands.
- 107 published pages, split more or less evenly between online tools and long-form articles.
- Six focus categories: developer utilities, web performance, cybersecurity, SEO, network/sysadmin, AI tooling.
- One custom WordPress plugin (going open-source once it climbs the engineering roadmap) that powers the backend probe endpoints behind the network and security tools.
- Zero analytics tracking. No Google Analytics. No Facebook Pixel. Nothing watching what you click. Want the exact list of what gets stored in your browser? It’s all in the Cookie Policy.
Roadmap
I ship two to four pages a week, mixing new tools and articles. Next quarter, a few things. Deeper case studies on hardening real-world WordPress installs. A run of LLM-evaluation walkthroughs as new models land. And getting the tool UIs translated into more languages, which is slower going than I’d like. Some topic ideas come from an internal AI pipeline I built to flag gaps I’ve missed. But a reader sends in something concrete and useful? It jumps the queue. Usually wins, too.
